


severed crossed fingers

by arbitrarily



Category: True Detective
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mob, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 19:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6719893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>You don't have to do these things.</i> Mob!AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	severed crossed fingers

**Author's Note:**

> While spring cleaning out a bunch of old files, I found a lot of random fic I never posted or I posted to an LJ comment ficathon. This was written circa March 2014, aka the mob!AU no one asked for but me.

 

 

 **2012**  
  
Maggie sits with her hands folded in her lap.  
  
“I haven’t seen Rust since we left Louisiana. That was ... ” she trails off. “Six years ago?” Another pause. “I haven’t seen Marty either since. I’m not sure what help I could be.”  
  
“You haven’t visited Marty?”  
  
Maggie’s mouth twists in a flat simulacrum of a smile. “I’m sure you’ve done your due diligence. You’ve seen the prison logs. You know the answer to that question.” Neither agent says anything but both look expectantly to her. “He wasn’t interested in seeing me.” She adjusts her posture that much straighter.  
  
The older agent leans forward. He is trying to appeal to her, she can tell. “We were hoping you could clear some stuff up for us today. We were, uh, curious about the extent of your knowledge back then. ’95 through ’02.”  
  
“I’ve already testified to that effect, back during Marty’s trial. It’s all on the record. I didn’t know a goddamn thing.” The mild bite to her town corroborates this.  
  
“That’s right. You had no knowledge of Marty’s role in Quesada’s operation.” He doesn’t tack the question mark on the end of the question, but it’s there. Lingering, affording her an out should she decide to take it.  
  
“Correct,” she says.  
  
“And what did you know of Rust Cohle?” the younger agent asks. The older one shoots him a quick look. She can’t remember their names. She should’ve taken more care with their names.  
  
“I don’t know how you mean.”  
  
“I mean, he was Marty’s partner there for awhile, working in close proximity, taken into the fold those seven years. I’m asking what you knew about him.”  
  
“You’re asking if I knew he was a cop. One of your own.” She raises her chin slightly, bites the inside of her lip. “And I’m telling you: I had no idea.”  
  
  
  
  
  
**2002**  
  
It’s Laurie who tips her off, Laurie who inspires Maggie to try and assemble the puzzle that is Rust Cohle.  
  
Laurie tells Maggie that Rust is secretive. This isn’t anything new. It’s something they speak of often: over coffee, at the cafeteria at the hospital, in Maggie’s kitchen with steaming mugs of tea, in Laurie’s with over-filled glasses of wine. Rust keeps secrets, both women know this. This time, they are in Maggie’s kitchen. Laurie is dressed professionally, something about a medical conference downtown, and Maggie is tired, her girls sullen and silent, Marty’s absence equally disquieting and a relief. She has a cake in the oven, chocolate, for Audrey, a peace offering, and she leans her weight against the counter as Laurie speaks.  
  
“You know how he is,” Laurie says, a hand waved as if she wishes she could pardon this – how he is or the fact Maggie knows. Because Maggie does know how he is. Laurie says that Rust keeps a piece of himself locked away at all times. That you can’t build a future with a locked box, not when the contents can never be known and tested.  
  
“It’s a gamble, he’s a gamble,” but Laurie says it lightly, with the same casual care when she drops the words, “Lubbock, Texas,” into the conversation. That he was there before he was here. It doesn’t fit, not with what he’s told Marty and what he’s told Maggie about himself. Where Marty attempts to hide each and every aspect of his business with Quesada, Rust is refreshingly open about it. About himself. He told her that he did time, a brief stint. Following the death of his daughter, he lost himself. That’s what he said. That when he got out he joined up with the Iron Crusaders, that it was a chapter of his life marked by empty violence, an empty heart. That after he came here, to Quesada, to Marty. To her.  
  
Rust doesn’t lie to her.  
  
“I didn’t know that,” Maggie says quietly, as the oven’s timer buzzes. “About Lubbock,” she says.  
  
Laurie shrugs, picks at the bowl of strawberries Maggie set out. “He was drunk. All he said was, if they never sprung him from Lubbock, he wouldn’t even be here. And I said, ‘what’s that?’ and he said, ‘Texas,’ and then. You know. Locked box, no key.”  
  
“Sure,” Maggie says, distraction pulling at her. Lubbock, Texas. “No key.”  
  
  
  
  
  
**1995**  
  
“What have you been doing, Marty?”  
  
She asks him the question after he shuts their bedroom door, hands braced on her hips, Marty’s eyes widen with lack of preparation.  
  
“What? Working, you know. Work. Rust and I, we’ve been – we’ve been real busy.”  
  
Marty only tells her things when he’s drunk or after he’s been made to feel small. The real things. Marty doesn’t need to say those things; Maggie isn’t blind. She can see. She just likes the concept of plausible deniability.  
  
Marty is an accountant. There was supposed to be something solid in that. But what Maggie didn’t know until they were engaged was that while she had her family, he had a family too – one headed up by Ken Quesada. The Dixie mafia’s more or less HQ’d up in the Lexington area with Wynn Duffy’s crew, but a lot of power’s come to be harnessed down in New Orleans, and as of late via Quesada’s jockeying, in their neck of the woods. Maggie knows all of that, but not through Marty. Through Marty what she knows is that he and Geraci head up a small accounting firm that oversees a considerable number of restaurants, laundromats, and pawn shops in the area.  
  
What she knows is that Marty launders Quesada’s money and Rust collects that money for him.  
  
Rust Cohle. She’s been hearing that name for a good while now without having a man to attach it to. The first time she heard the name was at the baptism of Quesada’s newest grandchild. Geraci’s wife Sherilyn wanted to know if the new guy was coming. Of all the wives, Sherilyn knew the most. She brandished that knowledge like a scepter of her own creation, presiding over her uniquely feminine court arranged in her kitchen around sour lemonade and jello salad. Sherilyn knew about Rust. She called him handsome and wanted to know if handsome was gonna show his face. That was almost two weeks ago. On the ride home Maggie had said to Marty, “Who’s Rust?” His whole body had gone rigid, like she’d caught him in a lie he forgot he’d told – and these days, that’s not much a tall order – before he sputtered out a confused, “What? Who? Oh yeah, Rust?”  
  
“Yeah, Rust,” she said.  
  
“New guy. In from Texas. He does the books with me.”  
  
“Yeah,” she said again. The headlights illuminated their closed garage door as he pulled into the drive. “You should invite him over some time.”  
  
Now, in their bedroom, doubting his every word, Maggie brushes the hair off Marty’s face.  
  
“You shouldn’t stress so much,” she says. She steps out of his reach as his hand searches for her hip. “And bring Rust by for dinner. Friday. No arguments.”  
  
  
  
  
  
**2002**  
  
In a bright cheery chain restaurant they sit in a booth by the window. Laurie’s been gone six months now; Maggie’s known the truth about Rust for near just as long.  
  
“You could leave, you know,” she tells him. His blinks at her, inhales the better part of his cigarette. She finds it hard to watch him smoke. The deliberate force of his inhale, the way the smoke seems to fill him with a similar necessity to oxygen – it makes her own lungs ache. Like she’s underwater. There’s romance in that somewhere, she thinks: looking at him makes it hard for her to breathe. “You don’t have to go through with it. There is nothing to be lost in stepping away. Reclaiming yourself. There’s only something to be gained.”  
  
“Now, I can’t tell: you saying these things for my benefit, or for Marty’s? Fuck, I forgot to include the third party.” He exhales in her direction, she blinks. “Your own. This make you feel good? Showing me a trap door underneath the noose?”  
  
“Rust,” she says. He stabs out his cigarette, the ashtray already full.  
  
“You don’t have to do these things,” she says, her voice quiet and almost wistful. She reaches across the table and loosely fits her fingers around his. They flex under hers, his fingers rough and calloused, but he doesn’t pull away.  
  
“You never did understand,” he says, that low almost lilting drawl, his head bowed as he says it, eyes and mouth aimed at her throat.  
  
Her face hardens but her hands are gentle. She doesn’t correct him, not now, and not with words.  
  
In two days time each of the three would step away, reclaim themselves. Find that Maggie was wrong: there was something to be reclaimed, but lost as well.  
  
  
  
  
  
**1995**  
  
Rust got scooped up by the FBI from a hospital room in the psych ward in Lubbock, Texas. An offer was made: all of his misdeeds, all of his moral debts, would be forgiven in exchange for himself as one of their undercovers. Rust working undercover for the FBI. Infamous history and their go-to guy when they need someone dangerous for a dangerous job. Known as Crash. Uses his past undercover work with the Iron Crusaders to get in with the Dixie mafia. He’d been shot and decided in that hospital bed that he was done with a lot of things, but namely Texas. This is what he tells Marty when he meets him. Becomes known in the mob as the Tax Man, always carrying that big notebook of his, listing debts in his own tightly scrawled shorthand.  
  
In 2012, Rust tells the agents that it’s incredibly easy to disappear. “People think that takes a real talent. It doesn’t. You can slip away. You can become something unrecognizable, even to yourself.” He inhales deep with a cigarette pinched between his thumb and index finger. “I should fucking know. Made a damn fine career out of it.”  
  
In 1995 Marty says to Rust: “I need you not to talk to these guys like that.” Rust cocks his head. “You know what I’m saying, I can’t be having you walk in to the Fox and Hound shooting all that gibberish, about, about, about shadows and guilt and dead bodies, psycho’s fears, or whatever, man. Be cool, is what I’m saying.”  
  
“Be cool,” Rust repeats. Two hours later he returns to the car with a black eye and bloodied knuckles, Marty muttering under his breath, _godamnit, god_ damn _it, you smug piece of shit, god_ damn.  
  
  
  
  
  
**2002**  
  
It’s Rust’s medical file that gives him away.  
  
It’s a CT scan that starts the whole thing, and it’s Maggie. For the seven years that Maggie has known Rust she’s known his problems. The headaches, the lost time, how he sees things that aren’t really there. He’s candid about it, his past drug use, and Maggie has spent the better part of the past seven years trying to convince him that help is a thing that can be had and held in his advantage.  
  
A moment of weakness and Rust chomping down on a couple of aspirins finally yields one concession: Rust at her kitchen counter, reaching for his iced tea, saying, “Fine, fine. I’ll do the scan.”  
  
“Doc’s gonna want your old records,” she said, and if he knew, if he knew the trap buried inside that file, he didn’t show it. Instead he just drawled a disinterested yeah, a swallow of iced tea, and then: “Your people know how to go ‘bout that, I take it.” And they did. She did.  
  
They faxed her his file, COHLE, RUSTIN SPENCER, and Maggie let her curiosity get the better of her. She finally finished that puzzle.  
  
In Rust’s medical file, the old file, under employment it reads: STATE POLICE – VICE. And under a hospital discharge from Lubbock, Texas following emergency surgery for three gunshot wounds, it reads FEDERAL CUSTODY, and a notation below that refers him to the FBI. That simple.  
  
When Maggie read it, she sat at the nurse’s station, everyone milling around her, working, the phone in front of her ringing and she ignored it. So fucking obvious, she thought to herself. He’s a cop. That night she sat through dinner with Marty and Geraci and his wife, this new knowledge sitting heavy inside her. She turned it over again and again. All the signs she must have missed, that Marty missed, all of them. The thought bled out into something more frightening, more insidious: that there weren’t any signs. That Rust was just that good.  
  
Seven years, she tells herself now as she drives. He’s been undercover for seven years.  
  
Maggie knocks on his apartment door. When he opens it he asks, “What’s wrong?” like he’s expecting her response to invoke the name Marty. She does not say her husband’s name.  
  
“I need to talk to you,” she says instead, and Rust merely nods at that, that same inquisitive bead on her, and she can see it all now, can see him so perfectly as a cop. It makes her want to laugh but she holds that in, slots it right alongside all that ugly truth about him.  
  
She steps in through his kitchen and she can hear him following her. Her eyes trained on the mattress on the floor, the wall bare save for a crucifix, she says to him, “I do a lot of work, you know. Keeping up appearances.”  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean,” he says, but there’s no inflection in his tone to mark it as a question. Her palms are sweaty and she rubs them against her thighs as she turns to face him.  
  
“I know what Marty does. I know what you do. And I know, should anything happen,” she says, her choice of words careful, “I could be considered both vulnerable and a vulnerability.”  
  
Rust doesn’t say anything but he’s watching her carefully, the expanse of the room still serving as a buffer between them. She curls her hands into fists, her fingernails biting into the palms of her hands.  
  
“I got your medical file, Rust.” He doesn’t react. “I read it. I know. I know who you are.”  
  
“I’ll say it again,” Rust says, his voice low, belying danger. “What’s that supposed to mean.”  
  
“Texas State Police. The feds.” She’s never seen Rust look surprised before, but she can see hints of it now. Everything about him reads that much more controlled.  
  
“You tell anyone what you read?”  
  
“No,” she says, giving him a peak at the cards she’s playing. “I thought I’d come to you first.”  
  
“Give me a chance to clear my good name?” he asks it meanly, defensiveness coloring everything about him, answering any question she might have had. It’s true, she thinks.  
  
“No,” she shakes her head. “Give me some hope,” she says, “That there’s a way out of all this.” His face softens that much, still all rough unforgiving angles, and Maggie takes a step forward.  
  
“Do you even know who you are? Anymore?” A quiet question, no blame in it from her, just sympathy.  
He raises his chin. “Who I am has never been defined by my allegiances.”  
  
Maggie smiles, but her face is sad. “I don’t think you think that’s true.”  
  
Rust’s mouth twists and he looks her up and down. “You hold a man’s life in your hands, at the very least you could look a touch more pleased about it.” Maggie crosses her arms over her chest.  
  
“What are you gonna do with Marty?”  
  
A pause, his jaw tightens. It’s here she can see she has finally misstepped. She brought Marty into it.  
  
“My job,” he finally says.  
  
  
  
  
  
**2012**  
  
“Damn, that is some good coffee. Folgers? Maxwell House? Starbucks? Fuck, it don’t even matter: tastes like liquid gold to me.”  
  
“You’ve been in lock-up over at Florence High, going on ten years now?”  
  
“Shit. Thanks for the reminder, Sergeant Buzzkill.” Marty takes another sip of his coffee, savors the taste. “I only been out in Florence High five years. They had me out at Pollock, back in Louisiana during the trial, after I was released to their infirmary.” He holds up three fingers. “All to the abdomen.” Marty sets the mug down on the table, doing his best to ignore the handcuffs around his wrists. “Much as I appreciate the hospitality and the change of scenery, I gotta ask: what’s this all about? Shit went down in ’02, and far as I know, the story ends there.”  
  
“Sure, sure, sure. We’ve just been doing a review, past cases, past undercovers, just wanting to make sure everything adds up.”  
  
“You bring me in to talk about Rust Cohle? Jesus Christ, way to bury both the lede and the goddamn punchline.”  
  
“A lot of time has passed, and were just hoping – ”  
  
“A lot of time,” Marty repeats. “Fuck, that’s all we get is time, and never enough at that.” He grits his teeth, his jaw clenched tight. “We’re all just doin’ time.”  
  
  
  
  
  
**2002**  
  
A sad country ballad plays in the empty bar. Three in the afternoon and both Rust and Marty are on their fourth beer of the day.  
  
“You ever think – you ever realize that this, this right here, is your lot in life, and you just think, _shit_ , I never wanted any this.”  
  
Rust doesn’t say anything. He raises his beer to his mouth, cants his gaze upward at the muted weather on the television screen. Storm system out of the Gulf expected their way. These days, Marty gets weary instead of belligerent the more he drinks. Marty finds history remorseful and with each successive drink finds new need to plumb the depths of past wrongdoing.  
  
“I didn’t want any of this, you know. I did not.”  
  
“But you took it all the same,” Rust says.  
  
They both did. Over the course of the coming week Rust will take Maggie, take her at her word, and everything else will be taken from him. Seven years boiling down to the next seven days, ending with a parking lot gunfight with his former business partner and the dissolution of the Quesada crew.  
  
  
  
  
  
**2012**  
  
“Yeah, Maggie got out. Last I heard the Wit Sec boys put her up, West Texas, small town, little ranch, some land, maybe a horse. Told them I didn’t care much for the details, they could keep ‘em.”  
  
“There’s been some talk that Martin Hart’s wife was a bargaining chip of yours.”  
  
Rust snorts. “‘Martin Hart’s wife,’ shit, man, I guarantee she don’t appreciate being known for that much.” He takes a long pull from his flask. “But yeah, I hear that talk. Rumors. I used her. She used me.” He chuckles under his breath but his face is mean.  
  
Rust leans forward; he continues. “We’re all born into the business of human existence, and it’s an ugly one. All your negotiations waged with your own blood and your own flesh, whether you read it that way or no. The money, the cash, we focus on that, but it’s just a placeholder – a down payment. It’s a business with a final and definite termination. What I’m saying is, we all got a price on our heads and we’re all just bargaining and begging off that final payment. Her, me, you, him, all us.”  
  
Rust lights a cigarette. “You read my file – quit dancing and ask me a fucking question.”  
  
  
  
  
  
**2002**  
  
Maggie comes back to his apartment.  
  
He eyes her warily but doesn’t say a word as he steps away from the door, back into his apartment. Maggie shuts the door behind her.  
  
He takes a seat at his kitchen table bare save for a bottle of cheap whiskey and Maggie steps forward to him. “Rust, I – ” she starts and then she stops. Looking down at him, she cups his face, just for a moment. There’s a plan, she reminds herself. Rust is still, as motionless as she has ever seen him. When she pulls her hand away he reaches up, his hand covering hers, as he presses it to his cheek again, tilting his face into the pressure of her touch. She drags her other hand through his hair and he loosely wraps an arm around her waist, pulls her to him, his face pressed against her stomach, breathing deeply. Her fingers press against his scalp, her fingers brush against his forehead, and she holds him there.  
  
She hears herself say, “You can trust me,” and all that does is make him push her away. He stands up, takes a pull from the bottle of whiskey. There is a plan. She sides with Rust. She earns Rust’s trust. Marty goes away. Marty goes away and she can leave Marty, take the girls, start again. Rust is the plan. Rust is her clean slate.  
  
She kisses at the hinge of his jaw but he won’t touch her. “I want you,” she swallows, “I want you to be yourself. With me.” Her hand pressed at the center of his chest, his heart beating solid and steady and quick. She says his name, a quiet demanding “ _Rust_ ,” before she presses her lips to his throat. When he groans, her entire body can feel it, a seismic event passed from him through her.  
  
His fingers curl into a fist beside her hip and she angles his head in her direction. He’s breathing heavily, his eyes slanted near to closed, and she closes that gap: her body flush with his, her mouth against his. He kisses her back, his fingers tight against the base of her scalp, the fist at her hip unfurling to touch her.  
  
Rust pushes Maggie back against the wall, his apartment empty and bleak surrounding them, his hands greedy, his mouth the same. He breathes noisily and as his hands pull at the sides of her panties, down her thighs, she lets herself get lost. He is himself and she is herself. Rust and Maggie, no ulterior motives, no subterfuge. There’s a future she can imagine as he slips first his hand, and then his body, between her bare legs, one that involves the both of them. One where this is the first rather than the only time –  
  
where if she leaves, she leaves with him.  
  
  
  
  
  
**1995**  
  
Maggie first meets Rust at her kitchen table.  
  
When they greet each other he doesn’t look her in the eye until Marty leaves the room. He finally looks at her, really looks at her. He’s drunk, bleary-eyed, but he strikes Maggie as too intelligent for his own good.  
  
“How you like your job?” Maggie asks, takes a bite of her salad.  
  
He shrugs, meets her gaze again.  
  
“I’m good at it,” he says. It’s almost like a threat. She smiles.  
  


 

 

 


End file.
